It has been a long journey these past eight months since graduation, so I feel like it is finally time to sit down and document it in some way. If you read any of the essays that I wrote leading up to graduation, and into that summer, you will know how I was feeling. I felt a tremendous amount of pressure to find a job. This pressure was unique in that I think I gathered the weight from different sources than others, but I think that the general pressure is one that all undergraduates share upon graduation.
Personally, mine came in part from my
prospects. Either I found a job and
started providing for myself immediately, or I would have to ask for someone to
pay for a plane ticket to get me across country to the only family I had
available that I thought could handle taking me in. The pressure also came in part from a
perceived lack of time. There were
things I wanted to get done by a certain time before life got too serious, my
duties too heavy, and I didn’t have time to screw around. The longer it took me to find a job, the
longer it took me to save the money I needed to do the things I wanted to do
before I had I jumped back on my career arc of academia.
There was an air of desperation
about my job search, so when I broke through before the other shoe dropped, so
to speak, at the end of summer right before my free housing was about to run
out, I couldn’t have been happier. I
thought to myself, “I did it. I pulled a
fast one on the corporate world”. They
didn’t know that I had no plans to stay, and that I was only joining to squeeze
some money out of them so that I could do something cool before going back to
school. Somehow I had finally talked my
way into a position that I had never planned or prepared to do in college. I was going to be white collar, middle class
on my own by 22. Young and
successful. I let out a breath that I
had been holding for an entire school year.
I get into the company, and I’m
excited. I’m ready to soak up
everything, be great at my job, and bring creativity to it that they had never
seen: I was going to Shake-Things-Up!
It’s an inside sales job, so they start talking about the art of the
sale, controlling the conversation, overcoming objections…I’m like, it’s a
game, and I’m going to be great at it!
All through training, there was nobody better. Every game, every role play, every test of
product knowledge, I was killing it. And
so management start to leave little bread crumbs in my mind. “Hey, with your pedigree, if you kill it here
you’re the type we like to promote.”
“You got all the skills to be as good as the best guy here. Listening to him, and listening to you,
there’s no reason.” I was the chosen
one, and it felt good. Felt right. I got my first paycheck, and I go get some
clothes, a watch, some earrings…Life was pretty damn good!
And then the game ended.
I get into on the phones, go live,
and I realize…these are real people that I’m talking to. I’m having trouble asking them for money
because I believe their objections. I’m
perceptive, I understand people, and I can’t say that all of them are going to
get good use out of the product. I
realize that nobody around me is telling the truth. I remember talking with a co-worker about how
much we hated the phones, and I said I didn’t like lying about discounts, and
she said, “Those lies are ok, I mean you have to”. And I was like, damn even you? This was business? This was what the incentive structure
required us to do? Red flags started
jumping up.
But management was good, they
stayed in my ear. The whole environment
played on my pride, and I didn’t like doing worse than my peers. I was the chosen one at first, and now I was
dead last. When it was a game, I played
it better than everyone. When it became
real, I felt too much and couldn’t treat it as a game. I didn’t want to fail, so I spent months
struggling to make myself see the situation as a game again, to get back to
winning, like I was supposed to.
And then I started to look bigger
picture. I started to think, I have had
this same conversation now for the past few months. I’ve made a 100 calls a day, talked for over
2 hours a day, having the same 10 minute
conversation over, and over, and over again. People did this for how long? They worked within one company, made a
career, made a life out of perfecting
this one, stupid, inane conversation?
And of these, a lucky few were given the chance to become management,
where they could convince other people to find it within themselves to perfect
this one, stupid conversation. There
would be the glory of getting your team to drink the company Kool-Aid, after
being there long enough to know full well what terrible chemicals were really
in it. Once there, someone would feed
you the Kool-Aid that if you toughed it out for long enough, and a spot happened
to open up, you could finally climb out of the drudgery of middle-management to
the rarefied air of upper management.
There, at least, the decisions were abstract enough that you could get
back to using your brain to solve abstract problems. There, maybe, your intelligence would be
required once again.
I started looking at the bigger
picture of corporate life in general. Two
weeks of vacation each year for the rest of your life. 40 to 50 hours a week, if not more, spent
doing something that was either mildly engaging or downright
soul-sickening. And finally by this past
December I realized, yo, I don’t want to do this anymore.
But I can’t leave the pay check, I
need it for my rent, or I’m right back to flying across the country hoping for
extended family to take me in while I lick my wounds. I didn’t want to have to say, “Life in the
big city, couldn’t make it.” So I
dragged myself to work each day, and frantically searched for another job. IAtfirst all I could seem to come across where
sales positions. I interviewed
half-heartedly for a few, hoping that once I got inside I would see something
different, something better. All of the
people seemed cool, the companies on the rise, said their sales culture was
actually enjoyable, and the opportunities for money were through the roof! And all I could seem to hear was, “Do you
drink Kool-Aid? Do you?”
I looked into other corporate jobs,
and it was more of the same. Entry level
PR, “Kool-Aid?” Entry-level marketing,
“Kool-Aid?” I was getting desperate. I would sit in front of my computer fighting
the urge to just quit and go home so I didn’t have to spew out the nonsense
that was required of me to one more customer who didn’t want to hear it. It had taken me almost a year to find my
first job, but I needed this one by tomorrow.
By yesterday.
It was probably one of the lowest
times of my life. I wanted to curl up
inside my head, pull the curtains on my awareness, and sleep-walk through this
phase of my life until I could find a way to be free. I felt like my plastic personality at work
was bleeding over into the rest of my life…my mind was caught in muck, and I
couldn’t remember how to relate to people, how to have the energy to care. Things that came naturally were drifting
away…And I thought to myself, “Is this what becoming an adult is? Is this all that is left in life?”
And then an amazing, wondrous thing
happened.
I got laid off.
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